Esri, the global leader in location intelligence, has announced its location analytics product ArcGIS Insights now supports connecting to cloud-native databases—Snowflake, Google BigQuery, Amazon Redshift, Microsoft Azure SQL, and others—that many organizations have been adopting for scalability, cost of ownership, and performance reasons.
With cloud-native storage, these databases are now directly accessible for Insights users. In most cases, data will remain in the native data store, and Insights will push queries and operations down to the database level, which means high performance and support for bigger data. Organizations can now easily analyze their GIS data and cloud-native databases together.
After the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, for instance, the City of Akron, Ohio, needed accurate, real-time data to make important decisions on how to bring furloughed employees back to work and support active city employees. City officials had to determine which employees were essential and nonessential, and the officials needed better data to do so. They used Insights to increase data transparency in the administration as well as to help them make decisions as they transitioned their workforce.
“Once cabinet members had access to Insights, they started to see how it could help their business processes in their divisions,” said Darren Rozenek, IT applications manager for the City of Akron. “It opened up a lot of these things that historically would have never even been discussed. We were able to give them their own ROI [return on investment] . . . just by showing them their data in a more specific and targeted way.”
